Thinking Activity: A Tempest Aime: Cesaire

 

Hello Friends,

Welcome to my blog. This blog based on the lectures of professor Balaji Ranganathan.

A Tempest Aime: Cesaire 

The difference between the two playwrights, however, is that Shakespeare was problematizing the colonizer/colonized relationship for his strictly English audience, while Cesaire was writing for both the colonizers and the colonized. And though there are differences in the way the playwrights thought out the problem of master-slave relations, there is a striking similarity in how they expounded this relationship of Magician-Duke and Monster-Slave. Only the slave who desires freedom resists the master.

Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest interrogates the relevance of Eurocentric sophistications and value systems in the black cultural context. In fact, the black ethics and cultures had either been distorted or misrepresented in the European literature and history about colonial subjects throughout the ages but the black intellectuals like Aime Cesaire have always challenged to rectify and re-interpret those editions of colonizers-colonized tales. The Eurocentric values, which were taught in the guise of universal knowledge, experienced extensive critique in Cesaire’s play. 

By introducing local relevance in the play, Aime Cesaire has actually defied the colonizer’s edition of a colonial story where black indigenous traditions had been marginalized. In this article, I shall examine how The Tempest by Shakespeare comes across appropriations and rectifications in Cesaire’s edition of the play. This  will also interrogate how by re-interpreting a canonical text, Cesaire is actually developing the notion of cultural decolonization.Youths were able to find their identity throughtheir stories and project an image of themselves that they could live with. Finding self-value despitethe image imposed by the colonizer on thecolonized relates to Caliban’s monologue in ATempest when he confronts Prospero about the constraints Prospero placed on him:

And you lied to me so much,

About the world, about myself,

That you have ended up by imposing on me

An image of myself:

Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior.

-Caliban, in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (Act III, Scene 5, Line 129)

Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite has explained the implication of the word ‘mulatto’ in Caribbean cultural context. He argues:

Two main kinds of creolization may be distinguished: a mestizo-creolization: the inter-culturalation of Amerindian and European (mainly Iberian) and located primarily in the Central and South America, and a mulatto creolization : the inter-culturalation of Negro-African and European (mainly Western Europe) and located primarily in the West Indies and the slave areas of North American continent.

(Brathwaite, 344)

In a way, Brathwaite’s perception regarding the multicultural West Indies concentrates on the basic tenets of the plurality of his society and the two significant examples of “inter-culturalization” are the mulatto and mestizo communities. From this perception, Césaire’s play A Tempest can be interpreted because though the play has not brought into focus the plurality of his culture and society, it has certainly pointed out the differences of opinions regarding freedom and slavery.

I also thankful to Professor Balaji Ranganathan for the informative lecture.

Thank you..